Evil?

What Is Evil??:

Length: 281 words (0.8 double-spaced pages)

Rating: Red (FREE)

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The word evil can have many different meanings, such as morally bad or wrong, causing ruin, pain or injury, or an evil force, power, or personification. Simply by the definition of evil, one can only have a grasp of what evil is, but only through experience one can understand evil fully. Evil is readily perceived differently among people of certain, religions, races, ages, sexes, and mental prowess, but the underlying factor of evil is always geared toward negative outcomes, either physical or moral.

Evil is when one purposefully causes pain, not pain caused by fault. Evil is knowing something is morally wrong, but still proceeds in doing so. A great misunderstanding about evil is that unintentional harm to some extent is not evil at all. For example if you're driving along a street and you ran over a cat accidentally and killed it, that is not evil. Although being evil is unadmireable, it is necessary because without it there will be no good. How can one define good, without evil. Just as how can you have love without hate. It is just like yin and yang, evil balances out the good in this world. Although I am not glorying evilness, there is always some evil in everybody.

Where do we draw the line between evil and good? We can't. The boundary is based on one's opinions, usually dependent on religion, childhood, and mental prowess. Religious people might think stomping on a roach is so evil that you will go to hell, or people with a deprived childhood might think shooting dogs with homemade bolt guns is fun, like in the movie "The Good Son." Basically evil is based on each individual.

Evil is the Bad hardened into the absolute. Good and evil contend in every mind. Evil comes into its own when it crosses a line and commits itself and hardens its heart, when it becomes merciless, relentless. Evil is a word we use when we come to the limit of humane comprehension. But we sometimes suspect that it is the core of our true selves

Is it possible that evil is a problem that is more intelligently addressed outside the religious context of God and Satan? Perhaps. For some, that takes the drama out of the discussion and dims it down to a paler shade of Unitarianism. Evil, in whatever intellectual framework, is by definition a monster. It has a strange coercive force: a temptation, a mystery, a horrible charm. Shakespeare understood that perfectly when he created Iago in his secular and motiveless malignity.

If evil is a constant presence in the human soul, it is also true that there are more souls now than ever, and by that logic both good and evil are rising on a Malthusian curve, or at any rate both good and evil may be said to be increasing in the world at the same rate as the population: 1.7% per annum.

Religions over many centuries developed elaborate codifications of sin and evil. The Catholic Church, for example, identified Sins that Cry to Heaven for Vengeance, (oppression of the poor, widows and orphans, for example, or defrauding laborers of their wages), Sins Against the Holy Spirit, and so on, sins mortal and venial, virtues cardinal and sins deadly.

With the emergence of a new world will come a recodification of evils. Obviously offenses against the earth are coming to be thought of as evils in ways we would not have suspected a few years ago. The developed world, at ! least, is forming a